BAD NEWS FROM SOUTH DAKOTA

South Dakota is about to enact a law banning abortion except to preserve the life of the mother. I think I heard that there were 800 abortions performed in South Dakota last year. They’re trying to get the case up to the Supreme Court to see what Roberts and Alito will do with it. Obviously they’re hoping for a decision endorsing the right of the states to regulate abortion any way they like, i.e. reversing Roe v. Wade, but they’ll probably settle for a broader set of restrictions than the states are currently allowed to impose, which is probably what they’ll wind up with.

I’ve never had an abortion myself, but I know several women who have, one of them very close to me. It hasn’t ruined any of their lives, though it did destroy the relationship of one of them with a really good guy whom she might otherwise have married. The world is full of things that can do that, and might have done it in that instance. I also once represented a young woman whose parents threw her out of the house because she wouldn’t get an abortion.

I do believe the US Constitution should protect a woman’s right not to be pregnant. I would vastly prefer to work out ways to do it that don’t involve abortion. But most pro-lifers don’t object to involuntary pregnancy and wouldn’t be willing to cooperate with me and those who share my beliefs to reach a middle ground. Certainly not if cooperating involved endorsing solid sex education and safe, reliable, accessible, reversible contraception.

But I think both sides in this impending battle may have lost sight of the real people making real decisions in South Dakota. The abortion controversy is no longer about an individual woman terminating a pregnancy, for whatever reason, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s about Which Side Are You On. I prefer the “pro-choice” side, because most of the people whose opinions I value are on it—but I don’t necessarily share all of those opinions, and neither, I suspect, do most pro-choice women of childbearing age in South Dakota. I’m no longer in that age bracket, which is just as well. Making a decision like that would be hard enough without all the shouting and side-taking. Face it, the most traditional “family value” these days is making life difficult for women.

THE GAPS IN MY RESUME'

These days, everybody has a resume. Most people make a point of keeping it up to date and ready to send out at a drop of the job market. Google “resume'” and literally thousands of websites will pop up on how to write one, where to send it, and what to do next. I look at mine, and marvel at its utterly linear monotony. It does exactly what it is supposed to do. It keeps my name and address from being circular-filed for jobs I really qualify for. It’s supposed to be the trajectory of a career. At least at my age, it’s supposed to be an ever-accumulating catalog of accomplishments. And, yes, here they are, sort of.

But what isn’t there is both the really interesting stuff, and my own enthusiasm for the stuff that looks boring. Nothing at all about the roads not taken. Nothing at all about my having turned down a role in an Equity company play when I was just out of college, or an offer to be lead singer for a group called the Electric Underwear when I was in grad school.

And nothing about what I was doing while doing the Official Job stuff—making a respectable second income as a free-lance writer, taking care of a disabled family member, keeping a small religious congregation organized, helping my father and my aunt through their retirement and final illnesses and dealing with the loose ends of their estates, doing the same thing for my in-laws, playing guitar in one of the very first proto-neo-klezmer groups, integrating the “men’s bar” at a local flagship department stores, raising a foster daughter through her teen years and after, helping get my kid brother through the devastating first years after our mother died—you get the idea.

Not even much about the meaning of the Official Jobs themselves. One lists me as the director of the midwest office of a small nonprofit, providing information and research to lawyers and paraprofessionals in a rather esoteric field of law. Actually, what I was doing—what I and everybody who knew me believed I was doing—was helping to end the war in Vietnam. Another lists me as a staff member of a legal organization that provided similar information to attorneys in the area of family law. Well, yes, I did that. In the process I helped write the first version of the domestic violence law in our state.

For a while I was a federal law enforcement official—which really meant I was trying to keep crud out of the waters of the United States while the folks in Washington were trying to keep us from being too successful, by reorganizing our office and chain of command every four months or so. And while doing it, I was dealing with a life-threatening health crisis in my own family. No prospective boss is ever going to know about any of this.

Will anybody? These days, our local paper (the Chicago Tribune) has a wonderful policy of writing really interesting obituaries about ordinary people. I don’t know if other papers are doing it too, but it’s really neat to celebrate the amazing things ordinary people do with their lives. I guess that’s where all the stuff that doesn’t show up in our resumes will show up. But wouldn’t it be great to be able to show it to the people whose paths we cross while we’re still alive?

Alas, no, not necessarily. Showing one’s real self to a prospective boss is a sure way either to never get hired, or to hold the job only long enough for the boss to find somebody less visibly interesting. There are no dull lives. There are no dull people—being interesting is part of being made in the image of the Holy Blessed One. But there are organizations and even whole societies and cultures in which one is required to appear dull, and to be enthusiastic about very dull things. It’s the interesting things that get in the way of the Ordinary Course of Business. It’s the interesting things that make the utterly predictable dullness of imagined robots look better and better to the corporate world.

At the beginning of a journey, and at its end, we tend to look curiously at the map. On the road, we are usually too busy driving. So here I am, near the end of the journey, looking at my resume' and being absolutely certain that it is not all there is, and wishing wishing wishing that it were not all there is of my social/public/work self.

THUNDER ON THE LEFT

I am not always ecstatic about what the leadership of the Democratic Party does and doesn't do these days. And I can remember back to the Good Old Days when there really wasn't a dime's worth of difference between them and the GOP, not because the Democrats were so conservative, but because the Republicans were so moderate. I can recall having voted for three Republicans in my life, back in that day, and I still don't regret any of those votes.

But these days, there is considerably more than a dime's worth of difference between the two parties. Maybe not as much as I'd like, but enough to make it absolutely clear who I'm voting for and contributing to. Those who don't find that difference wide enough to be inspiring should bloody well be working on some serious third party.

Those who just say (as I've seen all too many people say since the State of the Union message) that the Democrats don't deserve our support because they have no policy and no spine, are clearly doing the work of the GOP. If they are not getting paid by the GOP, they should send in their vouchers now, so that at least somebody will get something out of their irresponsibility.

In fact, the Democrats have lots of policy--try American Progress Action Fund progress@americanprogressaction.org or "Tom Matzzie, MoveOn.org Political Action" moveon-help@list.moveon.org or "Howard Dean" democraticparty@democrats.org or progress@americanprogressaction.org if you want to get into the dialogue. No, they don't "speak with one voice." And a good thing, too. This is too big a country, and its problems are too big, to be competently examined in a single voice. If you don't like the voices you hear, quit whining and contribute your own voice. Happy Superbowl.